Retro, twin-stick shooter based in sci-fi and cyberpunk roots. Battle through the Legion.exe research arena against the latest in military robotics technology. The only way to earn your freedom is to battle your way through countless waves of enemies and survive the Legion of Scorn!!

8Dio just dropped a pretty big sale ($140 down to $40) on their Clare line of virtual woodwind instruments.
I only have the Flute one, and it does have some significant issues. When you are doing legato lines, the notes will end abruptly. If you play individual notes, they will loop fine! Probably has something to do with how you program legato patches in Kontakt.
The interval jumps do sound good, and I like the messiness of the occasional key clicking.

One of my favorite things for this instrument is to take the flute down an octave (as heard above), it really gets chill down there, but keeps some of the neat pad clicking and other breath noises. I rate the 8Dio Clare Flute as “kinda fun”. 8Dio Clare isn’t going to replace my CineWinds Flute for flexibility.

Recommendations:
If you’ve been waiting for a little more ‘organic’ sounding winds, and accept that it is going to take a lot more time to get it sounding right, Do it!8Dio Flash Sale on Clare

I’m trying very hard to live in the future. A future where I don’t need
to touch light switches because the room knows what kind of light is needed. A future where copyright is reasonable. A future where transportation doesn’t suck. A future where the octopuses have their rightful seats on Earth 1’s Privy Council.

Next time you’re looking for new podcasts, try out some FUTURE podcasts!

Podcast #1: 2100

Jason Peters hosts “2100”, which is about the year 2100, and sometimes addressed to the people of 2100. This is the reason podcasts exist. Real people talking about their fears, expectations, and hopes of something they care about. It’s just like talking to some of your more interesting friends who are interested in the FUTURE!

Check it out

Podcast #2: Our Ludicrous Future

Tim Dodd, Ben Sullins, and Joe Scott talk weekly about electric cars, space missions, and rockets. Each of the hosts specialize in one area and there is a lot of good explanation on the news of stuff that is building our FUTURE!

MuseNet generates MIDI data. That data is then rendered out using synthesizers that you can hear on the twitch stream.

Composition Quality: As good as most people. The Bach styles are quite good (better than most people). The contemporary styles like Broadway, Movie Themes, and TV Themes are not as good. Okay, most of them sound terrible – but they would be passable if played by people.

Audio Quality: Worse than most people. These renderings aren’t going to take anyone’s jobs, and there is little of use here beyond novelty – but that’s not the AI’s fault. Someone could hook it up to better virtual instruments, and I’d bump this rating up.

Importance: Medium. This isn’t the first MIDI AI to come along, but it is fairly general, in that it can current do a number of different styles. It also has a nice web interface and streams on Twitch sometimes!

Long-Term Prospects: Low. There are a lot of abstractions going on here. The training data is MIDI, so the output is also MIDI. This AI will never learn how to play the violin or pipe organ, but it does a good job of writing notes for a violin. This is a composition helper tool more than a finished-music generation tool.

This technology does a good job of understanding chords and melodies. If you pair this with a better MIDI rendering engine you could create usable background music for public spaces and video games.
The note-based MIDI approach is a lighter-weight solution that doesn’t require as much computing power as generating a 16-bit 44khz waveform directly.